What should we think of The Wire? Not the HBO show, not the old British band, not even the news agency, but Josh Korr's singlehanded effort inside Publish2.com to create a robust best-of-the-Web package that forms a link-economy approach to online publishing.In essence the plan is to offer The Wire free to everyone. Anyone who uses it is presumably linking to the source content, which in turn is deriving the page view, unique visitor and time spent metric that can be monetized.Like a lot of other efforts in the link economy, it's worth watching. Korr (who wants to be accompanied in short order by loads of others to produce The Wire) insists this is not an Associated Press killer. But it has the potential for online news outlets to cobble together national and international coverage through a series of local files.

If you can get past the self-interests in the post (ahem, it's a vendor of the proposition it makes), there's an interesting premise inside the Publish2 argument that newspapers should worry less about acquiring wire services and focus instead on linking out to them ---- in essence, becoming an aggregator for their communities, a reliable one-stop locale for the meaningful information on an issue or story.The link economy is getting plenty of endorsements at the moment as a possible option in an evolving media economy in which it's becoming more difficult to buy what you need. Just create your own newswire of links, it argues.